Diary of an Arcade Employee

How Retro Video Disc Systems Work

When Video Disc systems started showing up in my friend’s homes, they seemed like magic. For the life of us we couldn’t figure out how you got pictures off something that looked like a record and it would be years before we came to fully understand the technology. If only I had stumbled across this handy graphic they published in a 1981 issue of Popular Mechanics I could have sounded like a genius while explaining the basics of disc tech to my buddies.